Erling Wold's Queer led off the program, billed by the 
composer as a "longish trailer" for the complete work.  An 
adaptation of an early autobiographical work by William 
Borroughs from the 40's and 50's (which was published only 
in the 80's), Queer follows Burroughs on his struggles to pick 
up men and boys in Mexico City.  The textual elements of the 
story are only partially set to music.  Lee (the Burroughs 
character) was portrayed by strong-voiced Trauma Flintstone. 
Ken Berry portrayed the primary love interest, Eugene 
Allerton, as well as various other roles, and Jim Cave directed. 
The scenes demonstrated Wold's primary strength to be his 
wide-ranging palette of musical colors.  Starting from a 
melancholy, minimalist scene set in a bar where Lee attempts 
to seduce Allerton, Wold deftly employs musical repetition, 
from extended passacaglia forms featuring various solo 
orchestrations designed to convey the south-of-the-border 
atmosphere, to more minimal counterpoints.  Pardoxically, the 
narrative texts and arias tended to fly by too quickly, with no 
repetition -- so if one happened to miss a key line here or 
there, there was no second chance to recover the storyline. 
Nevertheless, the scenes of Queer could be clearly discerned 
as growing more and more restless throughout.  The frenetic 
Lee kibitzes a chess game, visits a doctor in a quest to score 
drugs, and eventually convinces the indifferent Allerton to join 
him on his quest for the mystical Yage.  A great deal of the 
material delivered at Z Space was spoken over a musical 
backdrop, and much of the plot was difficult to follow, but in 
the end the ensemble -- consisting of keyboards, bass, trumpet, 
violin, Wold himself on guitar, and the two singers -- 
commanded a warm reception from a discerning audience.